nameandnature | Entries tagged with christianity

Friend Iain recently read the New Testament and reviewed it. He made some comments on it, including the observation that the early Church members thought that Jesus would return within their lifetimes. This prompted some comments giving the standard evangelical gloss on these passages (see also), to avoid the conclusion that the Bible contains errors. I wrote a comment:

http://de-conversion.com/2008/11/09/the-psychology-of-apologetics-biblical-inerrancy/ is worth a read to understand what’s going on in the comments here :-) Short version: Quine says evidence alone doesn’t compel us to change a particular belief, because we can modify another one instead. Quine was writing in the context of scientific theories: if you don’t measure a difference in the speed of light in two directions, say, maybe there’s no luminiferous aether, but if you really think there must be one, maybe the Earth sort of drags the aether with it, or your instruments were faulty, or something. Paul thought Jesus was coming back within his life time, but if you really want Paul’s writings to be without error, what Paul actually meant is that you should live with a sort of Buddhist detachment to the things of this world.

Quine has clearly got something over the sort of naive falsificationism (i.e. if your theory is ~~disproved~~contradicted by a single experiment, it’s curtains for that theory) which is supposed by some to be how science works. Nobody discards a trusted hypothesis so easily.

Still, something seems to have gone wrong with a theory when it allows anything: if you started from the position that the Bible contains no factual errors (call this innerancy1), you probably would not have predicted what Paul wrote in 1 Thess or 1 Cor 7:29ff, 1 Cor 15:51 (“sleep” = “die” here) etc; yet there they are, and what-evangelicals-call-inerrancy (call this inerrancy2) is somehow compatible with them. I think this means that inerrancy2 doesn’t compress anything: it’s just a list of what happens (the Bible) with a cherry on the top (“this list contains no errors or contradictions”). I’m using Eliezer’s ideas about http://lesswrong.com/lw/jp/occams_razor/ here.

Stephen Law's paper Evidence, miracles and the existence of Jesus argues that the New Testament (NT) is not good evidence for the existence of Jesus. He takes an interesting approach: he argues that the evidence for the NT miracles isn't good enough, and that the presence of the miracle stories contaminates the non-miraculous parts of the story such that we should be sceptical of those too.

Law introduces and defends two principles:

P1 Where a claim’s justification derives solely from evidence, extraordinary claims (e.g. concerning supernatural miracles) require extraordinary evidence. In the absence of extraordinary evidence there is good reason to be sceptical about those claims.

and

P2 Where testimony/documents weave together a narrative that combines mundane claims with a significant proportion of extraordinary claims, and there is good reason to be sceptical about those extraordinary claims, then there is good reason to be sceptical about the mundane claims, at least until we possess good independent evidence of their truth.

He then uses these in a deductive argument, concluding that "there's good reason to be sceptical about whether Jesus existed".

Debating P2

Most of the debate in the comments on Law's blog is about P2. Law says that "Because once we know that a powerful, false-testimony-producing mechanism (or combination of mechanisms) may well have produced a significant chunk of a narrative (e.g. the miraculous parts), we can no longer be confident that the same mechanism is not responsible for what remains."

Bradley C. came up with some counter-examples to P2. Bradley rightly says that the false-testimony-producing mechanism is key. What feels different about the ancient miracle reports (and perhaps Law's "sixth islander" thought experiment) compared to Bradley's examples is that in the ancient reports, we don't really know what the mechanism was, we just know something has gone wrong. (In Bradley's examples, we know that magicians and faith healers do tricks). If we don't know quite what has gone wrong, we have to consider various possible mechanisms, which includes ones where the mundane testimony is also false. If we give such mechanisms any weight, that makes the mundane testimony less convincing (though it may still be positive evidence for the mundane events). But I think we'd have to consider how much weight to give them based on the circumstances, which makes it hard to come up with something general like P2.

So, I think Bradley's come up with the equivalent of Gettier cases for P2 as it stands: even if they're contrived, they show P2 needs changing.

Law responds to Bradley saying "You need to identify a mechanism as being the likely mechanism accounting for the false miracle claims, and then explain why that mechanism wouldn't quite likely result in false mundane claims too."

I don't agree with Law here. If all we know is that something's gone wrong with the testimony but the mechanism is obscure, perhaps it's reasonable to say that it's as likely that we'd have the testimony if it's mundane parts were true as it is that we'd have it if the mundane parts were false. Then the testimony is no evidence for or against the mundane events: you should consider the events as likely as you did before you heard the testimony.

I'm not sure I'd want to go further than that and say that the burden of proof is on the people who believe the mundane portion of the testimony to show why it isn't contaminated: mightn't they equally well argue that the burden is on you to show that it is? But that's what P2 says, I think: in P2, the testimony becomes evidence against the mundane events.

If you give a mechanism, though, maybe that's just what you can argue: if you think Jesus' disciples made it up, for example, who's to say where the made up stuff ends? (Though why not make stuff up based on a real person, for verisimilitude?)

It looks like someone who wants to justify their belief in the mundane stuff has a motive to push the unbeliever to identify the mechanism so they can criticise it. The problem with my "average over possible mechanisms" idea, above, is that it's pretty hard to identify them all. I don't think we have a duty to do that with every weird testimony, though. Earlier, in defence of P1, Law correctly says that "the fact that it remains blankly mysterious why such reports would be made if they were not true does not provide us with very much additional reason to suppose that they are true."

So, I'm not that convinced by Law's general contamination principle, but I think he makes some good points along the way. For example, Law says:

It would also be foolish to try to construct a two part case for Jesus’ miraculous resurrection by (i) bracketing the miraculous parts of the Gospel narrative and using what remains to build a case for the truth of certain non-miraculous claims (about Jesus’ crucifixion, the empty tomb, and so on), and then (ii) using these supposedly now “firmly established facts” to argue that Jesus’ miraculous resurrection is what best explains them (yet several apologetic works – e.g. Frank Morrison’s Who Moved The Stone? – appear implicitly to rely on this strategy).

William Lane Craig's rebuttal

The apologetical strategy Law talks about is used by William Lane Craig in his "4 facts" defence of the resurrection (see Craig vs Ehrman, for example). Craig read Law's paper and attempted a rebuttal on his own blog, which I think was only partially successful.

Craig's stuff about Ehrman is weird. I guess Craig's point here is to show how reasonable he's being by pointing out that even this bloke he beat in a debate (Ehrman) agrees with him. But Ehrman is not a radical sceptic, Law is not die-hard mythicist. The conclusion of Law's argument is that we should be sceptical about J's existence, not "Therefore J never existed", so it's not even clear that Ehrman's ire applies to Law, or that we should care if it does, unless Ehrman's arguments are made more explicit.

On Sagan's dictum that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence", Craig writes: "This sounds so commonsensical, doesn’t it? But in fact it is demonstrably false. ... Rather what’s crucial is the probability that we should have the evidence we do if the extraordinary event had not occurred. This can easily offset any improbability of the event itself."

Craig makes a reasonable statement of Bayes Theorem. However, Sagan's dictum can be read in a Bayesian way (by incorporating all the probabilities Craig mentions, so that the evidence is Bayesian evidence). Craig gives no good argument that the dictum must mean what Craig takes it to mean, or that Law's argument relies on taking it to mean what Craig thinks it means.

Craig continues: "In the case of the resurrection of Jesus, for example, this means that we must also ask, “What is the probability of the facts of the empty tomb, the post-mortem appearances, and the origin of the disciples’ belief in Jesus’ resurrection, if the resurrection had not occurred?” It is highly, highly, highly, improbable that we should have that evidence if the resurrection had not occurred."

This might be Craig's attempt at that argument, namely, Craig saying that Law hasn't considered that it's unlikely we'd have the evidence we do if Jesus didn't do miracles. But Craig plays fast and loose: the facts are that we have the gospel narratives (and whatever other historical documents we have to hand). The empty tomb and post-mortem appearances are not facts, and Law's argument against the "bracketing" strategy is that they cannot be treated as facts. Craig cannot have the empty tomb or the post-mortem appearances as "facts" without addressing Law's arguments.

Oddly, Craig doesn't address really P2 or Law's arguments for it at all: he just says "oh no it isn't". Craig's strongest when he says that there is extra-Biblical evidence for Jesus' existence. I'm not an expert, but my understanding is that Josephus' mentions of Jesus is thought by historians to have a core around which Christian interpolations accreted, for example. Since even if we grant P2, Law's argument fails without premise 6 ("There is no good independent evidence for even the mundane claims about Jesus (such as that he existed)"), perhaps this is a good tactic on Craig's part. Law appears to agree that premise 6 is his weakest empirical premise: "6 is at the very least debatable". In a way, it's odd that everyone is concentrating on P2.

So, I think Craig casts doubt on Law's conclusion about Jesus' existence, but he doesn't do much to convince us that Jesus rose from the dead or did any other miracles.

Jerry Coyne's blog has some good comments on Craig's rebuttal.

David B Marshall's rebuttal

David Marshall also had a go at rebutting Law. He didn't do as well as Craig, as his arguments relied on attempts to differentiate Law's thought experiments ("Ted and Sarah", and "The Sixth Islander") from the claims about Jesus, but the distinctions he made between these weren't relevant to Law's arguments, as far as I can tell. You can see my response to him here , his reply here and my response to that here.

I think this rebuttal is interesting for what it shows about what ordinary believers (rather than super-apologists like Craig) think are good arguments. Marshall appears to think that because the Jesus story is more fleshed out and more meaningful, it's more likely to be true. I'm not sure whether this is a straightforward example of conjuction bias (obligatory Less Wrong link), or of the notion that the point of religion is to be in a meaningful story. Charitably, it might be an attempt at inference to the best explanation, but I don't think the stuff that Marshall mentions means that the best explanation of the NT stories is that they are true.

So what do you think?

There was bloke called Jesus who was the basis of the NT stories. Pre-moderns had porous selves, so it's pretty difficult to understand their writings in modern terms, but there is no good evidence that this bloke did miracles or rose from the dead. I don't know how much of the NT is true, but I don't accept Craig's bracketing or 4 facts arguments: taking out the core miracle but leaving the context which points to a miracle does look like cheating without independent evidence of the context, because mechanisms whether both the context and miracle are made up seem pretty likely to me.

How to resolve poor battery life & battery issues on Android | Ken's Tech Tips: There's an app for that.
(tags: battery android)
Cognitive Biases - A Visual Study Guide: Presentation on cognitive biases.
(tags: cognitive brain bias psychology)
Banned from the buses: mattghg is the source of my bus farrago links, so here's a link to his post, where he argues that ex-gay therapy might work and that there are free speech concerns with Boris banning the ads.
(tags: mattghg ex-gay adverts advertising bus religion homosexuality)
Spitzer Retracts his 2001 Paper – Kind Of… | An Exercise in the Fundamentals of Orthodoxy: Peter Ould again, this time on the retraction of the main paper people quote as evidence that homosexuals can change orientation.
(tags: science ex-gay psychology homosexuality peter-ould)
Ex-Gay Adverts on London Buses | An Exercise in the Fundamentals of Orthodoxy: Peter Ould, who identifies as "post-gay", has some interesting comments on the bus advertisement farrago.
(tags: ex-gay adverts bus christianity peter-ould religion homosexuality)
On Spitzer’s “Change” « Limning the Psyche: "People are asking me about Robert Spitzer’s reported desire to retract his study of 200 people who claimed to have experience change of their sexual orientation. "
(tags: homosexuality psychology)
If Atheists Talked Like Christians… (A Contest): Reversing some popular Christian sayings. Kind of fun.
(tags: parody funny atheism christianity religion)

What Nonbelievers Believe | Psychology Today: "Common sense, not complex philosophy, often drives religious skepticism."
(tags: belief psychology atheism science humanism religion)
Without a pack of lies to back them up, Christian claims of persecution fall flat on their face: "So these two women, again with the help of the evangelical activists who are seeking special privilege for Christians, have gone to the European Court of Human Rights claiming that the equality law is wrong and should be changed. The Government has argued that the court's decisions were right and that the law has been correctly applied in both cases. The National Secular Society has made the same argument in an intervention in the case, the only intervener to do so.

This could hardly be more different from arguing that the Christian cross must never be seen in the workplace again, as the newspaper headlines imply."
(tags: politics uk religion christianity)

deconversion | Black, White and Gray: Some Christian sociologists did some research into why people leave, by looking at 50 de-conversion "testimonies". Results: intellectual problems (hell, suffering, reliability of the Bible); God's failure to answer prayer; other Christians responding to doubt in trite or unhelpful ways. Contact with unbelievers wasn't often cited as a cause of de-conversion.
(tags: psychology de-conversion christianity religion sociology)
I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave | Mother Jones: "My brief, backbreaking, rage-inducing, low-paying, dildo-packing time inside the online-shipping machine."
(tags: economics work warehouse poverty shopping shipping online amazon)
Why Richard Dawkins is still an atheist - Guest Voices - The Washington Post: Paula Kirby on the recent "Dawkins admits he's an agnostic!" stories following his debate with Cuddly Rowan Bear. "Religious commentators have become so excited at the thought of his conversion that I almost don’t have the heart to break it to them that he said nothing in Thursday’s discussion that he hadn’t already said six years ago in "The God Delusion""
(tags: the god delusion religion agnosticism paula-kirby richard-dawkins dawkins atheism)

What is the proper place for religion in Britain's public life? | World news | The Observer: An exchange between Dawkins and Will Hutton. D: "That doesn't mean religious people shouldn't advocate their religion. So long as they are not granted privileged power to do so (which at present they are) of course they should. And the rest of us should be free to argue against them. But of all arguments out there, arguments against religion are almost uniquely branded "intolerant". When you put a cogent and trenchant argument against the government's economic policy, nobody would call you "intolerant" of the Tories. But when an atheist does the same against a religion, that's intolerance. Why the double standard? Do you really want to privilege religious ideas by granting them unique immunity against reasoned argument?"
(tags: uk secularism politics religion dawkins richard-dawkins will-hutton)
The Sins of the Fathers - Richard Dawkins - RichardDawkins.net - RichardDawkins.net: Dawkins sez: "Yesterday evening I was telephoned by a reporter who announced himself as Adam Lusher from the Sunday Telegraph. At the end of a week of successfully rattling cages, I was ready for yet another smear or diversionary tactic of some kind, but in my wildest dreams I couldn’t have imagined the surreal form this one was to take. I obviously can’t repeat what was said word-for-word (my poor recall of long strings of words has this week been highly advertised), and I may get the order of the points wrong, but this is approximately how the conversation went." Lusher says Dawkins's ancestors owned slaves and wonders whether D will make reparations. Bizarre and desperate.
(tags: adam-lusher slavery dawkins richard-dawkins journalism newspapers telegraph)
Stephen Law vs. William Lane Craig Debate: Argument map » » The Polemical MedicThe Polemical Medic: "there’s lots of debate over who won the Law/Craig debate. Instead of joining that, I though I’d do something niftier: I’ve mapped the whole of the debate in argument form, to give a more intuitive way of seeing how all the arguments and objections interact". This is excellent stuff.
(tags: religion theodicy philosophy christianity atheism debate william-lane-craig stephen-law)
Evangelism, disbelief, and being 'without excuse' » » The Polemical MedicThe Polemical Medic: "Christians who indulge in evangelism and apologetics often hold to a thesis of disbelief as epistemic pathology – that disbelief is the result of some culpable error of judgment. Such an attitude is a poor fit for the facts and counter productive to the cause of evangelism. Ironically, the urge of these people to pathologize disagreement is diagnostic of their own epistemic pathology." I've mentioned this attitude (inspired by Romans 1) before: Thrasymachus neatly dissects it.
(tags: philosophy epistemology christianity religion apologetics evangelicalism evangelism)

When people ask why I have a problem with religion, it's hard to come up with a single answer... - Imgur: (tags: christianity islam religion)
Worrying developments for freedom of expression in the UK - Various - Various - RichardDawkins.net: "This thread combines a number of examples where atheists, humanists and/or secularists have been threatened or coerced into silence, both by Muslims and by institutions or other groups apparently subscribing to the view that 'If someone believes it, you must respect it'. All these examples have happened in the UK in the course of the last week or so. ... But the key thing to note in all these cases is that it is no longer just the religious who would inhibit our freedom of expression: increasingly, secular bodies are buying into this invidious idea too, all in the name of 'tolerance' or 'community relations' or 'respect'."

Fuck it, I'm joining the EDL.

Just kidding, I don't have the beer belly or the conviction for football hooliganism and I've never seen a "Muslamic raygun". Still, it is alarming to see these things happening in Britain. Who are the reasonable opposition? Can't leave something that important to the Nazis.
(tags: sharia speech freedom islamism uk islam)
Atheism isn’t a religion, it’s a relationship … with reality | Unreasonable Faith: A summary of blogged responses to that "I hate religion but love Jesus" video that's been doing the rounds. I made a comment at the bottom. Also good for the comment thread on Atheismo, the diety for atheists.
(tags: relationship with god video atheism religion)
Driscoll & Brierley on Women in Leadership « Cognitive Discopants: Well known complementarian and fan of big strong manly men, Mark Driscoll, recently did an interview with Justin Brierley of Premier Christian Radio. Driscoll came out with a few choice quotes about Christians in the UK (“guys in dresses preaching to grandmas”).

He then had a go at Brierley for going to a church run by a woman (Brierley's wife!) and not believing in penal substitutionary atonement and eternal conscious torment in Hell (Brierley is an annihilationist: we unsaved will be told off and then vapourised rather then being tortured forever). Fun times.
(tags: homosexuality premier christian radio complementarianism mark-driscoll religion church mark driscoll christianity women sexism markdriscoll)
The Rise of the New Groupthink - NYTimes.com: "Most of us now work in teams, in offices without walls, for managers who prize people skills above all. Lone geniuses are out. Collaboration is in.

But there’s a problem with this view. Research strongly suggests that people are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption."
(tags: flow solitude groupthink team office work creativity)

Project Euler: "Project Euler is a series of challenging mathematical/computer programming problems that will require more than just mathematical insights to solve. Although mathematics will help you arrive at elegant and efficient methods, the use of a computer and programming skills will be required to solve most problems."
(tags: puzzles maths mathematics programming)
Science, Reason and Critical Thinking: How to replace the School ICT Curriculum: 10 PRINT "PAUL IS SKILL"
20 GOTO 10
The undeniable fact and its inescapable consequence | Alethian Worldview: "The undeniable fact is this: God does not show up in the real world, not visibly, not audibly, not tangibly, not for you, not for me, not for saint or for sinner or for seeker. ... the inescapable consequence is that we have no alternative but to put our faith in men rather than in God. ... When men say things on God’s behalf, and make promises that God is supposed to keep, the word they tell you is the word of men, not the word of God. That’s true even if what men say is, “This is the word of God.” They’re not giving you God’s word, they’re giving you man’s word about God’s word (or at least what they claim is God’s word). Sure, you can believe what men tell you about God if you like, but if you do, you are putting your faith in men. Before you can have faith in God, God has to show up, in person, to tell you directly the things He wants you to have faith in. Otherwise it’s just faith in men."
(tags: deacon-duncan religion atheism)
I Am An Atheist: 16 Things Atheists Need Christians to Know: Some only relevant to Americans, but there are some good general points.
(tags: lists religion christianity atheism)
Atheists face Muslim-led censorship from UCL Union: The atheist society at UCL posted a Jesus and Mo cartoon as the image accompanying their Facebook event. One Muslim objected as the cartoon depicts Mohammed in a pub (what the Muslim was doing looking at the Facebook page for an atheist event isn't clear). The UCL student union got a complaint from someone and asked them to take it down. They refused. The story got picked up by atheist blogs and Dawkins Our Leader and hence the newspapers. The union backed down though there's still the vague threat in the air that the atheist soc might be guilty of bullying or harassment.

Hopefully the media attention has put the fear of God into the Union and they won't be so silly in future. Muslims do not have the right not to be offended.
(tags: richard-dawkins dawkins ucl university censorship religion islam)
Bash Tips for Power Users: I didn't know about the "fc" command. Nice.
(tags: programming shell unix linux bash)
Twilight: The Use of Sparkle: If Iain M. Banks had written Twilight. Funny, even though I've never read/seen any Twilight.
(tags: parody twilight iain-m-banks sf science-fiction sci-fi culture books)
So who is good enough to get into Cambridge? | Education | The Guardian: Guardian reporter sits in on admissions meetings at my old college. Inevitably, the photo with the story is of King's, because it's prettier than Churchill.
(tags: churchill cambridge-university university education cambridge)
Fat Acceptance Movement. || kuro5hin.org: kuro5hin is still alive: who knew? Anyway, this is a recent Diary entry from HollyHopDrive who discovered a bunch of Fat Acceptance blogs while looking for fitness information. Her division of what she found into stuff she agrees with and bullshit looks sound.
(tags: medicine health fat)
The Americanization of Mental Illness - NYTimes.com: The expression of mental illness is cultural: anorexia was more or less introduced to Hong Kong by newspaper articles. A view in which mental illness is caused by brain problems rather than childhood experiences or demons actually makes people less sympathetic to those with mental illness, because they're perceived as being unfixable.
(tags: anorexia schizophrenia culture science psychiatry psychology)

I've been commenting in other places. You might be interested in where:

The Evil God Challenge

Stephen Law's Evil God Challenge is a new take on the problem of evil. The challenge is to ask theists why it's more reasonable to believe that there's a good God (accepting the standard theodicies for the problem of evil) than it is to believe there's an evil God (accepting flipped theodicies, for example, that evil God created us with free will so that we could freely choose to do evil).

Law has been dealing with responses to this challenge ever since his debate with William Lane Craig. On his blog, he mentions a conversation with Glenn Peoples. That blog entry attracted a few comments, so I joined in.

What does good mean?

There's been a lot of chat about just what Law means by good or evil, how this is "grounded" and so on, as theists often want to say you cannot have meaningful morality if there's no God (there's no reason to suppose this is true, as far as I can tell, but it's psychologically appealing even to atheists). Law says he's using the terms in a "pre-theoretic" sense (I suspect because he doesn't want the whole thing to turn into an argument about meta-ethics). Interestingly, I found a quote from Craig which says that theists shouldn't argue that atheists can't meaningfully use moral vocabulary, so I commented on that: it seems perfectly reasonable to use terms like (morally) good in the common sense way, or to point to cases like gratuitous suffering and call those evil (in fact, Law says he can make his challenge about suffering rather then morality: the challenge is then why it's reasonable to believe there's a God who doesn't want us to suffer unnecessarily, I guess).

Thomist God

I've also been responding to some comments by someone called BenYachov. He's been arguing that if you believe in the God of Thomas Aquinas (which apparently is the official God of the Catholic church), Law's challenge won't faze you. I was trying to tease out why. BenYachov claims that God "grounds" moral goodness but isn't himself a moral agent (a moral agent being something which is capable of acting on moral considerations). As Thomist God is not a moral agent, he cannot be said to be morally good or morally evil. Nevertheless, he is still Good in some sense related to "grounding" all goods and being perfect (the Thomists seem to like to use lots of Capital Letters for Significant Concepts).

I wondered at this Thomist God's "goodness" if it means nothing like moral goodness. I went on to say that this God is morally alien. He's a bit like what happens when weird aliens build an artificial intelligence. I was also still not sure what it means for Thomist God to "ground" moral goodness as he's not morally good, only Good: as I've said before, the word "ground" should be a red flag in debates like these, as it often means the other person is skating over something for which they don't really have a good explanation. Finally, I responded to another comment of BenYachov's, by saying that there's no reason to worship something because it created you or because it's mysterious.

I get the impression that there's a lot of work being done by Capital Letter Concepts in BenYachov's world, and a lot of trading on different meanings of the world "good". There's also the weird idea that these meanings have something in common and that there's an attribute called "Goodness" which somehow incorporates them all. This seems a bit like what Jaynes calls the Mind Projection Fallacy, the idea that every property we perceive in something is out there in the world.

Problem page

Over on Metafilter, there's a section where people can ask questions. Someone recently said they'd been talking to their father-in-law about religion and philosophy and ended up accidentally de-converting him from Christianity. Now the mother-in-law is trying to cut her daughter and son-in-law off. I posted a response trying to explain what the in-laws might be thinking, and suggesting that the best way back with the mother-in-law might be to talk about seeking truth.

Brains, sex, fat

livredor posted about brain sex differences and fat acceptance. I commented: I think the popularisation of research into neuroscience and evolutionary psychology leads to unscientific statements (see also this Less Wrong article about one way to misunderstand it), but there's also a set of feminists who don't believe in innate brain differences between men and women because it contradicts their ideology, making them equivalent to creationists. In the case of fat acceptance, I was also a bit suspicious of activist claims that the medical establishment is wrong about fat being unhealthy being linked with the desire to see fat people treated more kindly. I owe

livredor some replies there.

The return to religion - Telegraph: "Church attendances, in freefall for so long, have started to rise again, particularly in Britain’s capital city. Numbers on the electoral rolls are increasing by well over two per cent every year, while some churches have seen truly dramatic rises in numbers." (The electoral roll of a church is the only way the C of E has of recording membership: they don't really go in for the formal process of the free churches, as it's an established church).

This is interesting, though not sure how good the evidence of a revival is: you've got a couple of anecdotes plus evidence of a positive second derivative (decline is slowing). It's interesting that this is always presented as being about an alternative to shopping and a search for meaning rather than being about the evidence. I suspect that's the way it actually works though, depressingly.
(tags: christianity church-of-england anglican c-of-e telegraph uk religion)

Top Christian William Lane Craig is on his UK tour, and recently had a debate with the atheist philosopher Stephen Law. Premier Christian Radio seems to be organising the tour, and they've posted the audio of the debate.

I listened to the debate. A short summary is below, with a longer one underneath the cut.

The debate topic was "Does God exist?". Craig ran some of his standard arguments

The Kalam Cosmological argument, a First Cause argument which avoids the usual "who made God?" riposte by only claiming that "everything that begins to exist has a cause".
The moral argument.
An argument based on the evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus.

Law relied heavily on the evidential argument from evil, and his own variant of that, the one from his paper The Evil God Challenge, which Luke Muehlhauser has previously summarised here. Law has summarised his main argument in the debate on his own blog.

If you want to see my notes on the whole thing, read on, otherwise, skip to the end for my thoughts on how both of them did, and how atheists might do better.

( The gory details )

How did they do?

Who won? Hard to say, especially as I'm obviously biased. At the very least, Law wasn't crushed in the way that some of Craig's previous opponents have been.

I'm mostly going to offer what I hope is constructive criticism of Law. This is because I'm on his side :-)

Law's first rebuttal sounded a bit hesitant. He seemed to be astonished that Craig had actually claimed that theists don't conclude that God is good from looking at the world and didn't know how to respond to Craig's assertion that it's all about the moral argument.

Law had recovered a bit by his second rebuttal, but even later on, at times he didn't quite seem to have processed Craig's statement that looking at the world didn't provide evidence against either an Evil or a Good God: even after Craig had said that, Law sometimes seemed to be arguing as if Craig had said the opposite.

Craig's not afraid to use explicit syllogisms or arguments with numbered premises rather than relying on wordy arguments, so laying out the Evil God argument in that form would have allowed people to follow it better.

Law's failure to respond to the Kalam allowed Craig to score against by calling him a strange sort of atheist who believes in a creator (but see armchair generalship, below).

Craig accepts that we should generally be careful about accepting miracle reports but then argues the Jesus's resurrection is special. Law is right to say that Craig's reasons are flimsy, but he needs to say why.

Craig only used for 3 of his usual 5 arguments for God's existence. He left out the fine tuning argument and the argument from religious experience (which he usually turns into something close to an altar call). Law has written some strong rebuttals to the experience argument, and Law wondered whether Craig avoided it because of those. It'd be interesting to hear from Craig whether he avoided it for that reason.

In which I play the armchair general with 20-20 hindsight

Craig's claim that theists don't conclude the creator is good from looking at the world sounds well dodgy: you do see Christians saying stuff about how beautiful the world is and how that's evidence for their God. When Craig makes a claim where he seems to deviate from what Christians actually do, it's worth playing that up: "If you're a Christian who thinks that the beauty of the world is evidence for the Christian God, Dr Craig would disagree with you, apparently."

How do you solve a problem like the Kalam?

I'm not sure what I think of Law's refusal to say much about the Kalam (other than that it was also an argument for Evil God). It allowed Craig to score, but it could have ultimately been a good tactic as Craig's previous debates on the Kalam tend to turn into people trading obscure arguments about infinite sets or quoting from popular physics books.

If you're going to use Law's tactic, though, again you need to play it up more: "The title of the debate is 'Does God Exist?', and it's the Christian God that Craig is advocating, not any other possible gods. Craig is a Christian evangelist, the Kalam is there to lead you towards Christianity. But even if you are convinced by the Kalam, you are a long way from Christianity. There are countless other possibilities which shouldn't be ruled out merely because they're not as familiar as the Christian God you learned about at school, or because believing in them would make you a strange sort of atheist."

Arguments from authority

It's noticeable that Craig's allowed to quote people at length, but as soon as anyone else does, it's an argument from authority. That should be an easy (and funny) point for an opponent to make: Craig's defence of his moral argument is mostly quotes from people saying they agree with one or other of the premises. If Craig responds that he's quoting competent authorities, ask whether Swinburne or Plantinga are incompetent :-)

The resurrection

Craig didn't seem as polished on the resurrection as he has in the past, perhaps because he was expecting to get into the details and quote some more authorities. Law took it in another direction: just another unexplained weird report, like a UFO sighting that we reasonably assume wasn't caused by aliens without getting into the details of who saw what. All Craig can say about that is that there's no obvious natural explanation (which Law seemed to agree with and which doesn't affect Law's argument) and that there's something special about the context, by which he seems to mean the life of Jesus. That seemed ideal ground for a more specific counter-attack from Law than just calling it "flimsy".

The moral argument

The moral argument is a tough one because people are psychologically attached to both premises. In front of a general audience, I can see why Law wanted to be a bit careful not to deny absolute morality: Craig can then go into his usual routine about how there's nothing wrong with rape on atheism, or whatever.

Arif Ahmed famously did go after Craig on that second premise: "Dr. Craig says that 'objective moral values exist, and I think we all know it'. Now that might pass for an argument at Talbot Theological Seminary, and it might pass for an argument in the White House, but this is Cambridge, and it will not pass for an argument here." But Ahmed was talking in front of philosophy students.

Craig does get away with denying strong feelings, responding to the problem of evil. He says that philosophers are called to think rather than go on feelings, so perhaps that's sauce for the gander: our strong feeling that some things are Just Wrong shouldn't prevent us from thinking about it. If you're going to do that you do need to genuflect in the direction of people's feelings, though, as Craig does.

I think I'd try to unpick the psychological attachment: what looks different in a world where are no moral absolutes of the sort Craig wants when compared with a world where there are? Not much, as far as I can tell: even if they are there, people need some reason to obey them and it's open to them to say "I don't care what's Right". If you somehow discovered that there really were no moral absolutes, would you run out an murder your neighbour?

The segue

Craig accepts that the Kalam establishes the existence of a creator who might be evil, for all the argument tells us, but goes on to say that the moral argument shows that God is good. How does he know that whatever being "grounds" morality is the same being as this creator from the Kalam? Can the "God" in that the "no God means no real morality" premise be someone other than the creator? What is it about being a creator that also grants you morality-grounding powers? It's all pretty mysterious.

Similarly, what is it about the resurrection that links Jesus to the creator and to the morality-grounder?

In both these cases, Craig's relying on the audience's familiarity with Christianity to make the segue from one argument to the next seem obvious, but these are very burdensome details. The audience's familiarity with this stuff makes them vulnerable to conjunction bias. It's worth trying to get the audience to take an outsider's view of how the arguments work.

Other reactions

This Christian apologist thought Craig lost and came up with his own Evil God version of the moral argument, but thought that not questioning the Kalam made Law a funny sort of atheist.

Randal Rauser, another Christian, hosted an interesting discussion about Law's choice to only attack God's goodness. If Law is right, has he shown "God does not exist"?

Edit: Gregory Lewis has produced some excellent argument maps of the debate. I'd recommend those for another view of how it went.

He Said/She Said: Grim-meathook-future SF author Peter Watts's wedding vows: "And you and I are going to kick biological determinism in the balls." Aw, sweet.
(tags: wedding marriage biology monogamy)
Why Philosophers Should Care About Computational Complexity: "One might think that, once we know something is computable, how efficiently it can be computed is a practical question with little further philosophical importance. In this essay, I offer a detailed case that one would be wrong. In particular, I argue that computational complexity theory---the field that studies the resources (such as time, space, and randomness) needed to solve computational problems---leads to new perspectives on the nature of mathematical knowledge, the strong AI debate, computationalism, the problem of logical omniscience, Hume's problem of induction, Goodman's grue riddle, the foundations of quantum mechanics, economic rationality, closed timelike curves, and several other topics of philosophical interest. I end by discussing aspects of complexity theory itself that could benefit from philosophical analysis."
(tags: philosophy programming complexity compsci turing)
Does the future have a church? | The Briefing: What evangelicals think of the general decline in church attendance in the UK. Their churches are holding their own numerically but not growing, so becoming a smaller percentage of a growing population. However, they're doing better than other Protestant denominations, which will die out as their older members die off. Getting them while they're young is essential for propagating religion, and they worry about the lack of youf in the church. Social trends like cohabiting couples and single parent families are worrying because evangelical churches don't really know how to cope with those people so won't evangelise them effectively. Via the artist formerly known as nlj21.
(tags: church religion statistics christianity uk)
Kayonga Kagame Shows Us The World. Episode: Darkest Austria : Free Download & Streaming : Internet Archive: A hilarious spoof on ethnological documentaries: an African TV team comes to the Austrian province to document the strange behavior of the natives... including the Feast of the Chicken. *
(tags: funnny anthropology ethnology)

Apologist Josh McDowell: Internet the Greatest Threat to Christians, Christian News: McDowell is worried: “The Internet has given atheists, agnostics, skeptics, the people who like to destroy everything that you and I believe, the almost equal access to your kids as your youth pastor and you have... whether you like it or not.” Kind of revealing: McDowell is admitting that if you want to get kids into your religion, you need to get them young enough, before they've been exposed to other ideas.
(tags: internet apologetics josh-mcdowell christianity religion)

Metamagician and the Hellfire Club: On moral evaluations: Blackford points out that morality doesn't require anything spooky or metaphysical to be rational and non-arbitrary, so long as we're prepared to accept that "[w]hatever judgments we make do not compel all comers, regardless of their desire-sets, to act one way or another on pain of making a mistake about the world or something of the sort."
(tags: philosophy morality ethics error-theory mackie russell-blackford)
"Have friends who are atheists? Agnostics? Into Wicca? Or New Age?": Mefi discovers "Dare2Share", which is one of those worldview based Christian evangelism things where they're training Christians to understand other people's worldviews (which is good) as a preamble to converting them to Christianity (which would be bad). I've linked to Mefi rather than the site itself as the Mefites discussion is interesting. The site has cutesy names for their examplars, like "Willow the Wiccan" and "Andy the Atheist", so the Mefi crowd have come up with a few of their own.
(tags: metafilter apologetics christianity evangelism worldview)
New Statesman - The bugger, bugged: "After a chance meeting with a former News of the World executive who told him his phone had been hacked, Hugh Grant couldn’t resist going back to him – with a hidden tape recorder – to find out if there was more to the story . . . " Coppers taking backhanders from journos, oh my. No wonder the Met dragged their feet about the phone hacking case.
(tags: news journalism crime phones privacy surveillance police hugh-grant hacking)
Scientism « Why Evolution Is True: Jerry Coyne: "when used as a derogatory adjective, “scientism” means this:

the practice of applying rationality and standards of evidence to faith.

For religious people and accommodationists, that practice is a no-no. That’s why the adjective is pejorative."

I think there is something which we could validly call "scientism", namely the belief that science can answer all our questions, or that all questions reduce to scientific ones, or something. However, Coyne's point stands: "scientism" is often code for "how dare you ask us for evidence?"
(tags: scientism science religion jerry-coyne)

"Don't Talk to the Police" by Professor James Duane: Of course, in the UK, we don't have an unqualified right to silence, but this stuff's interesting anyway. There's a follow-on video where a police officer responds and says the professor is right :-)
(tags: law video police legal lectures rights)
Try Thinking | Here lieth the thoughts of SiânyB: "I do (despite appearances) totally understand the importance of prayer for some people – I know people who use it as a kind of meditation to clear their heads, to unburden their guilt or to enter some kind of celestial lottery of hope. But, given current world events, the message ‘Try Praying’ is a grimly obscuring lens through which to view your surroundings."
(tags: religion culture advertising prayer edinburgh christianity)
Sean Carroll: Does the Universe Need God?: Top theoretical cosmologist Sean Carroll wrote a chapter for the Blackwell Companion to Science and Christianity, and this is it. Interesting to compare Carroll's stuff with other popular science about the Big Bang.
(tags: philosophy god science bigbang big-bang sean-carroll physics cosmology)
The Blog : Being Mr. Nobody : Sam Harris: "Imagine a language in which, instead of saying ‘I found nobody in the room’ one said, ‘I found Mr. Nobody in the room.’ Imagine the philosophical problems that would arise out of such a convention. " Sam Harris quotes Wittgenstein to explain why he doesn't like to call himself an atheist.
(tags: wittgenstein atheism philosophy language sam-harris)
Fixing HTTPS: Glyph, of Twisted Python fame, talks about ways to fix HTTPS, presumably in the light of the recent attacks on certification authorities.
(tags: https security internet encryption)
AC Grayling: 'How can you be a militant atheist? It's like sleeping furiously' | Books | The Guardian: Graying mocks the people who call atheists militant and fundamentalist, and talks about his new book: "But the third point is about our ethics – how we live, how we treat one another, what the good life is. And that's the question that really concerns me the most."
(tags: philosophy religion atheism grayling books)

John Norman, the philosophy professor who created the barbaric world of Gor: io9 interviews John Norman, the famous complementarian and author of the Gor novels.
(tags: bdsm fantasy book scifi gordon-brown john-norman complementarianism)
Advice God: Like Advice Dog, but Advice God! I'm snaffling some of these: "UNCONDITIONAL LOVE/WITH CONDITIONS".
(tags: religion atheism funny god humour)
YouTube - Christopher Hitchens drops the hammer: "It's considered perfectly normal in this society to approach dying people who are unbelievers and say 'Now are you going to change your mind?'" Well, yes, that's anticipating-as-if there's a Hell, say. But if we're going to apply the norms of discussion fairly, I like Hitchens' idea of atheists going round religious hospitals. :-)
(tags: christopher-hitchens death religion hell conversion)
Hell and linoleum | Andrew Brown | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk: "What would it feel like to believe that anyone really deserved eternal conscious torment? Is it even humanly possible?" I think that Georges Rey's "meta-atheism" is correct on this point: most Christians don't anticipate-as-if there's a Hell, though claiming to believe it and still worshipping a monster is bad enough. berneray's comment is good, read that as well.
(tags: hell christianity religion andrew-brown)
Random Thoughts on The Roles of Leading and Following « Swungover: Via CW at Lindy. There seems to be much more debate about this than there is in ballroom, perhaps because ballroom's more conservative anyway, perhaps because it's settled by "you're shorter, therefore you're going backwards so I can see over you".
(tags: dancing lindy leading following swing)
New Statesman - Making marriage harder: "the world would be a far happier place if marriage was harder and divorce easier" - an interesting proposal from the New Statesman's legal correspondent.
(tags: marriage funny law)
At last an IT supplier that tells it like it is - The Tony Collins Blog: "No platitudes, just straight talking on govt IT from Martin Rice of agile software company Erudine." I've heard tales of middlemen charging government the Earth to take an £100/year hosting account and install Wordpress on it. Glad to see someone speaking up.
(tags: government economics politics uk waterfall agile IT)

YouTube - PASTOR ULTIMATE FIGHT: OK, so remixing videos of Pentecostal services is like shooting fish in a barrel, but you've got to love the person who though of turning it into an 90s video game.
(tags: funny pentecostal video youtube charismatic christianity)
Blogging in App Engine: Still vaguely toying with ditching LJ, and this looked interesting.
(tags: appengine python blog bloggart)
William Hague accused of 'anti-Christian' foreign policy - Telegraph: "Cardinal Keith O’Brien accused the Foreign Secretary of doubling overseas aid to Pakistan to more than £445 million without demanding religious freedom for Christians and other religious minorities, such as Shia Muslims. " I think O'Brien has a point: nobody should be coerced into conversion, and it's clear that Christians need some protection from the Religion Of Peace.
(tags: religion politics aid pakistan islam christianity)
Stop Being Wrong: A Moral Imperative: C.S. Lewis wrote that "You would not call a man humane for ceasing to set mousetraps if he did so because he believed there were no mice in the house." Wrongbot points out that to behave ethically one must have correct beliefs as well as the right theory of normative ethics.
(tags: ethics philosophy rationality morality wrongbot)
Some Perspective On The Japan Earthquake: MicroISV on a Shoestring: "Japan is exceptionally well-prepared to deal with natural disasters", and apparently, the system worked.
(tags: japan earthquake engineering culture)
Fukushima is a triumph for nuke power: Build more reactors now! • The Register: "Japan's nuclear powerplants have performed magnificently in the face of a disaster hugely greater than they were designed to withstand, remaining entirely safe throughout and sustaining only minor damage. The unfolding Fukushima story has enormously strengthened the case for advanced nations – including Japan – to build more nuclear powerplants, in the knowledge that no imaginable disaster can result in serious problems."
(tags: science nuclear safety physics japan earthquake)

Top Christian Nicky Gumbel, of Alpha Course fame, has a point when he says that cultural Christianity isn't worth much if you've never never darkened the doors of a church (save for weddings, Christenings and funerals) or accepted Jesus as your personal saviour or been slain in the Spirit or whatever.

I'm not sure the success of the Census Campaign would do much more than annoy those Christians who like to bang on about how this is a Christian country in online discussions. But that seems a worthy goal, so I'm happy to support it.

You never know, it might even help get the bishops out of the Lords, which would be even better.

The poster on the right wasn't endorsed by Gumbel or McDonalds (in fact, I'm told Gumbel got the quote from Keith Green): it's a mashup from Hampshire Humanists which Crispian Jago found. His site has plenty of other census posters for you to enjoy.

Misplaced outrage over High Court “ban” on Christian foster parents | Gavin Drake: Gavin Drake, a Christian journalist, points out that the judgement on foster parents doesn't do what the right wing press think it does (in fact, it does very little at all), and that the Christian Legal Centre are lying bastards (I paraphrase).
(tags: religion clc christian-legal-centre law foster homosexuality christianity)
Stephen Law: The case of the Christian would-be foster parents: "It's not the Christianity that's the obstacle. It's the bigotry (which happens to be religiously motivated)."
(tags: bigots homosexuality christianity law stephen-law)
Johns & Anor, R (on the application of) v Derby City Council & Anor [2011] EWHC 375 (Admin) (28 February 2011): The full text of the judgement in the recent case of a dispute between some Pentecostal Christians and Derby Council over whether the Christians' views on homosexuality made them unsuitable to act as foster carers. Paul Diamond, the barrister who takes a lot of these "help! I'm being oppressed!" cases on behalf of bigoted Christians, gets a bit of a kicking from the judges, which is fun. The judges' reasons for their decision, and the limits of it, are worth reading for how they differ from the hysterical reporting in the right wing press.
(tags: religion christianity foster law homosexuality)
Mervyn King is right. If the banks face no risk, we shall all go down - Telegraph: "They are the trade unions of the modern era, sick dinosaurs that crush ordinary citizens, writes Charles Moore." Blimey, and this the Telegraph saying it.
(tags: uk banking corruption banks politics economics)
Hamlet and the Methods of Rationality: This is fun...
(tags: rationality hamlet parody)
Gender Differences and Casual Sex: The New Research «: Revisiting that "I've noticed you around, will you go to bed with me?" study (as popularised by popular beat combo "Touch and Go") and disputing the conclusion that women just don't like sex: "the only consistently significant predictor of acceptance of the sexual proposal, both for women and for men, was the perception that the proposer is sexually capable".
It being a feminist blog, they then go against the science the other way and say that perception of risk is a much higher factor than the study suggested (the study thought it was an effect, but not the primary one).
(tags: science sex feminism gender)

I've got some links about this queued up in the link blog, but it seemed worth a proper post as well as the silly one about frogs.

What the Court really said

So, what happened in the recent case of Owen and Eunice Johns is that both sides (the Johns and Derby Council) asked the court for a ruling on an abstract point. Contrary to what you've read in the press about a "ban" on Christians fostering, Derby Council hadn't decided that they couldn't be foster parents, so the Johns were not seeking to overturn a decision, merely to establish a principle. (It's also worth mentioning that many Christians do not have bigoted views on homosexuality, and so talk of a ban on "Christians" is too broad).

The full text of the judgement should be required reading for anyone tempted to spout off about the case. It's a bit long, but there are moments of light relief, such as when the Court rounds on the Johns' barrister, Paul Diamond, who was funded by the infamous Christian Legal Centre:

In his skeleton argument and in his oral submissions, Mr Diamond lays much emphasis upon various arguments, many of them couched in extravagant rhetoric, which, to speak plainly, are for the greater part, in our judgment, simply wrong as to the factual premises on which they are based and at best tendentious in their analysis of the issues.

The Court makes reference to previous cases of anti-gay Christians seeking legal relief, such as the Gary McFarlane case, in which the former Archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey, intervened. The judges consider the previous judgements both correct and binding on them. As such, at the end of the case, they don't grant either side what they're asking for, and it's still up to the council to make their decision.

Old time religion

The courts are clear, both in this judgement and previous ones, that they are not ruling that anti-gay Christians are bigots: that's my language, not theirs. For my part, I have Christian friends who probably share some of the Johns' views. I think the best analogy I can find to that is the way much-loved elderly relatives sometimes start going on about "darkies" and immigrants and whatnot: it's obviously nasty, but you feel more embarrassed for the relatives than worried about the effect on black or Asian people. Usually, it's easier just to stay off the topic. (Edit: I elaborate on this analogy in discussion with

tifferrobinson on an old post, here). However, when that sort of thing comes from the mouths of people paid to act for the State, I don't think it can be allowed to stand.

A couple of Christian commentators have distinguished themselves by writing sensible stuff on this most recent court case: I commend to you Christian journalist Gavin Drake, who sounds even more annoyed with the CLC than me (perhaps because they're letting the side down); and Peter Ould (who I remember from my uk.religion.christian days).

At the end of his piece, Ould goes into the consequences for bigoted Christians: their continued attempts to make hay in the courts are failing, and he suggests that they should switch tactics, and instead look to the legislature, though I have to say that I don't expect them to do particularly well there, either: the Lib-Dems are liberal, and Cameron has been careful to disassociate himself from the crazy anti-gay right in his party.

Ould also points out the oddity of a monarch sworn to uphold the laws of God and a judiciary who no longer think that Christianity has a special place in UK law. I can't help but agree: disestablishment would now seem to be unfinished business, and I'd be in favour of it. It'd get the bishops out of the House of Lords, and maybe it'd stop bigoted Christians from wasting the courts' time with these fruitless lawsuits.

Edited: Bishop Alan Wilson also has some useful thoughts on the matter.

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The New Testament | I. G. Mansfield
Stephen Law and the existence of Jesus
Link blog: homosexuality, ex-gay, psychology, peter-ould
Link blog: belief, science, humanism, christianity
Link blog: de-conversion, shopping, psychology, dawkins
Link blog: christianity, richard-dawkins, philosophy, dawkins
Link blog: islam, christianity, office, solitude
Link blog: culture, university, programming, atheism
Comments elsewhere on theodicy, de-conversion, sex and fat
Link blog: anglican, c-of-e, church-of-england, christianity
William Lane Craig vs Stephen Law: Does God Exist?
Link blog: biology, statistics, funnny, turing
Link blog: apologetics, internet, christianity, josh-mcdowell
Link blog: mackie, phones, scientism, christianity
Link blog: philosophy, atheism, sean-carroll, edinburgh
Link blog: hell, funny, agile, humour
Link blog: japan, christianity, earthquake, pakistan
UK Census 2011: what would Nicky Gumbel do?
Link blog: homosexuality, christianity, law, foster
"Bigots never foster, part deux" or "What the Court really said"

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